The comrade who first introduced me to Ilyich told me that he was a man of scientific bent, that he read scientific books exclusively, that he had never read a novel and never read poetry. This surprised me. I myself in my youth had read all the classics; I knew practically the… [read more]

The October Socialist Revolution presented the toilers — workers and peasants — with extremely vast opportunities to rebuild their life. The worker felt he was the master of his enterprise: the peasant received land and saw his cherished dream come true. All that awakened them to… [read more]

1. If self-education is to be successful, it is necessary to develop a number of habits: to read to oneself; to not read too slowly; to know how to use books, newspapers, manuals and library catalogues; to know what to extract and how to write down notes. In… [read more]

It was for Yuny Communist in 1919 that I wrote my first article on self-education. It pointed out correctly that it was not “by sitting in an office, but by participating in collective activity that one could best educate oneself.” That is true. But then, the article was… [read more]

It is a strange thing: every Communist knows that bureaucracy is an extremely negative thing, that it ruins every living endeavor, that it distorts all measures, all decrees, all orders; but when a Communist begins to work in some commissariat or other Soviet institution, he… [read more]

Russia was an industrially backward country and for that reason her labour movement began to develop only in the 1890s — at the time when in a number of other countries the working class, armed with the experience of the 1848 Revolution and of the Paris Commune of 1871, was… [read more]